THE FOLLOWING: First Thoughts on FOX’s Dull Edged Thriller

The Following (2013) – Created by Kevin Williamson – Episodes 1-3 – Starring Kevin Bacon, Natalie Zea, Annie Parisse, Shawn Ashmore, Valorie Curry, Nico Tortorella, Adan Canto, Kyle Catlett, and James Purefoy.

In episode 3 of THE FOLLOWING, one member of serial killer Joe Carroll’s cult goes out and kills two professional critics of Carroll (James Purefoy). I bring this up in case someone violently stabs me while wearing a Ghostface mask or pulls me open with a meat hook, you can go question Mr. Williamson. It’s not that I’m going to savage THE FOLLOWING, though, so I’m probably safe.

What I am going to do is express my disappointment in THE FOLLOWING, FOX’s attempt to make an edgy thriller in the shadow of Silence of the Lambs. We’ve got ex-cop Ryan Hardy (Kevin Bacon) and Carroll, the serial killer he caught a decade earlier. In the first episode, Carroll escapes from jail but by the end of the episode he’s been caught. That’s all part of his master plan because he’s got a “following” (get it?) out there committing murders to make Papa Smurf happy. Each week we get the cult member of the week doing something gory and awful while Carroll sits in jail and says allegedly clever things.

It’s all a bit disappointing. Carroll isn’t as clever as he thinks, Hardy isn’t as tortured, and all of the gore, which is supposed to be one of the selling points, is pointless.

Let’s start with the gore, as this is clearly supposed to be one of the reasons to watch this show.

I’m not into gore unless there’s a point to it, but the only point to it here seems to be, “We can show gore on FOX.” And if that’s the case, then why are you doing it? Other people can do more gore than a network will ever be able to do, and I thought we got well beyond the “pushing the network boundaries” after Dennis Franz’s showed his ass on NYPD Blue. Honestly, we’ve got Starz not only showing tons of blood, but full frontal fish and sausage on Spartacus, so what’s the point of network edginess?

THE FOLLOWING attempts to offer a bit of rationale for the gore by having Carroll be a Lit professor who has an interest in Edgar Allan Poe. (Which likely means Carroll is a professor of 19th century, which means he has the job I’ll be trying to get. Awesome. For the record, my dissertation was on whales in literature, so you’re probably safe if I lose my mind.) The choice of Poe makes sense, but it’s also lazy and obvious. I’m not suggesting having a serial killer based on Edith Wharton would have made a better choice, but opening it up to all of the 19th century would have allowed for some really interesting cases. Wharton actually did write some ghost stories above and beyond her standard stories of manners, and having the FBI have to figure out which writer was being used could add some drama. Simply being Poe driven, it’s not exactly a challenge.

Not that the stories adhere too closely to Poe anyway. There’s some “oh, Poe blah blah blah eyes removed blah blah blah symbolism blah blah blah” bits, but really the show just wants to show lots of blood and set people on fire. Poe is just the excuse that gets tossed up to justify all the gore, which is pretty simplistic.

The cases don’t exactly involve much police work, either, since all of Carroll’s Cult Members of the Week seem perfectly happy getting caught.

There are three regular cult members: Emma Hill, Jacob Wells, and Paul Torres, and they’re the best part of the show. Well, not totally. The deal with these three is that years earlier, Emma because the nanny to Carroll’s son, and Jacob and Paul pretended to be a gay couple to get close to Carroll’s last victim, who he failed to kill. Now, Emma has stolen Carroll’s kid from his wife, Claire (Natalie Zea), and the three of them are living with the kid in a really nice house that the feds can’t find.

Emma (Valorie Curry) is far and away the best part of the show. A young woman who fell under Carroll’s spell, she’s the smartest member of the followers. Jacob is actually her boyfriend, and now that they’re back together, Paul is jealous because he’s in love with Jacob, too. (They got drunk and hooked up at some point.) Emma is totally psycho badass, though. To the point where – as wrong as this is – she’s really kinda hot. The deranged part of her isn’t sexy, of course, but the way she moves through this story is full-on confidence. More than either Hardy or Carroll, this is really Emma’s story and the more she’s on screen, the better THE FOLLOWING is for it.

One of the big problems with THE FOLLOWING is that there’s no chemistry between the FBI agents. I don’t know who any of these people are supposed to be and there’s no fun chemistry watching them interact. Shawn Ashmore is a quality actor but they’ve cast his character as a guy who idolizes Hardy, so when they sit in a car together, he’s all, “Oh my god, you’re so awesome, do you want to get cake later and braid each other’s hair and get it I’m YOU’RE follower because all the crazies are Carroll’s followers and oh my god it’s just so cool to help you hide your alcoholism and when I finally get sick of doing this and want to go star on a show that knows how to use me I’ll totally be revealed as a super secret double agent working for *squeeee!* Carroll!”

Ugh.

All that being said, I’m not going anywhere. There’s a lot of talent on this show and there are moments where it comes together. At the end of episode 3, Emma sends an email to Claire and Hardy showing her and Jacob teaching Claire and Carroll’s son how to kill. That is chilling. That is a billion billion supergajillion times more chilling that showing one of the feds bleed out from getting stabbed under his chin or lighting a guy on fire.

If I could make a suggestion on how to improve the show, it would be to ditch the sophomoric gore and focus on the middle America creepiness. That’s what THE FOLLOWING does well, but it doesn’t yet do nearly enough of it.

X-MEN: THE LAST STAND: I’m the Juggernaut, B*tch

X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) – Directed by Brett Ratner – Starring Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Ian McKellen, Famke Janssen, Anna Paquin, Kelsey Grammer, James Marsden, Rebecca Romijn, Shawn Ashmore, Ellen Page, Aaron Stanford, Vinnie Jones, Stan Lee, Daniel Cudmore, Eric Dane, Patrick Stewart, and R. Lee Ermey.

X-MEN: THE LAST STAND is a movie that’s half-okay and half-stupid, and the end result is a movie that I just wanted to end during the entire second half. There are times when THE LAST STAND is so laughably bad that you wonder how anyone could let it out the door, but for the most part, it’s nothing more than a disappointing movie. It’s not the worst movie ever made, but it’s just so incoherently put together that it gives off the vibe of people making it up as they went along.

Bryan Singer is out of the director’s chair and Brett Ratner is in, and it’s easy to lay the blame for LAST STAND at Ratner’s feet because he’s not half the director Singer is, but let’s be clear, Singer left LAST STAND so he could go work on Superman Returns, which is even worse than LAST STAND.

To give LAST STAND its due, the first half of the film isn’t really all that bad. It’s certainly faint praise to say, “Hey, it really is mediocre!” but this movie needs all the help it can get. LAST STAND opens with Scott Summers (James Marsden) still being all mopey and self-pitying about Jean Grey’s death. He’s shirking his duties as instructor, which means Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) has to fill in during a Danger Room sequence with Storm (Halle Berry), Colossus (Daniel Cudmore), Iceman (Shawn Ashmore), and Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page). After a “Days of Future Past” scenario, Cyclops takes off to find Jean back at Alkali Lake.

He finds her, they make out, and she kills him.

Yup, another X-MEN movie, another waste of James Marsden.

Logan and Storm get to Alkali Lake and bring her home, where she wakes up as the Phoenix.

Yeah, so, about that. Turns out Jean (Famke Janssen) has always had this really powerful dark aspect of her persona and Xavier put a whole mess of psychic blocks in her head to create a split personality. It’s sort of amazing how much dumb sh*t this insipid script makes these good actors say. Logan gets all uppity with Xavier (Patrick Stewart), but then Phoenix Jean wakes up so they can dry hump a bit before Logan realizes something is wrong. So she slams him against the wall with the power of her brain and exits the mansion.

She heads to her parent’s house, where Xavier and Magneto (Ian McKellan) try to convince her to come to their side. Xavier does his whole, “I can help you” bit while Mags is all, “I want you to be what you are” and Phoenix Jean can’t handle any of this so she levitates the house and then kills Xavier.

Yeah. She kills Xavier. That means in the first hour of the film, Jean Grey manages to kill the two most important men in her life, and the question I have is, Why?

There’s an incredibly strong sense of childishness in Ratner’s film, as if the film is doing everything it can to wipe out Singer’s work. Just look at what Ratner does to some of Singer’s primary players:

Cyclops: Killed.

Xavier: Killed.

Rogue: Checks out halfway through the film so she can go get the Cure, a shot that stops you from being a mutant.

Jean: Murders Husband. Murders mentor. Then turns into a mass murderer. And then gets killed.

Bobby: Goes from being the decent boyfriend to scamming on Kitty Pryde behind his girlfriend’s back.

Mystique: De-powered by the Cure, and left behind by Magneto.

Nightcrawler: Doesn’t Appear.

Stryker: Doesn’t Appear.

Magneto: De-powered by the Cure.

There’s also way too many new characters introduced in the third film: Angel (Ben Foster), Kitty, Juggernaut (Vinnie Jones), Beast (Kelsey Grammer), and a bunch of new Brotherhood members. This is the third film in this trilogy – I’m supposed to care about nearly everyone at this point, and I don’t. Up until Xavier’s funeral, though, this film isn’t awful, and Storm’s eulogy is actually pretty moving. I don’t know why they had Wolverine stand off to the side like he’s still not 100% a part of Xavier’s school because, as is rightly pointed out later in the film, Logan has been completely domesticated. The real problem is what comes after the eulogy, when the film resorts to a bunch of silly fights between people who’ve gotten a lot dumber between movies.

Hiring Ratner as a director could have worked if the film had been tailored to his strengths (childish buddy comedies, I guess) but clearly he’s not a guy who can handle intelligence or philosophy very well and so asking him to take over for Bryan Singer and not giving him the time to come up with a suitable script doomed LAST STAND right from the start.

THE LAST STAND ends up being not a very good movie. There’s some interesting philosophy here if you want to look for it (and Ratner doesn’t), but it’s an uneven, uninteresting film. There’s so many subplots haphazardly tossed against the wall that the film never develops a clear narrative. I’ll say this for LAST STAND, too – it’s not a fun movie to write about. When I was watching it, I just wanted it to be over.

And now that I’m writing about it, I just want this to be over with, too.

X-MEN: If You Were Really So Righteous, It’d Be You in That Thing

X-Men (2000) – Directed by Bryan Singer – Starring Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman, Ian McKellen, Anna Paquin, Halle Berry, Famke Janssen, James Marsden, Bruce Davison, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Ray Park, Shawn Ashmore, and Stan Lee.

If you stick around the Anxiety long enough, you’ll hear me say that I don’t care so much about how a movie relates to its source material. I’ve got the source material and what I want in a movie is a good movie. If that means they have to change something, so be it.

As long as it works.

If it doesn’t work, then filmmakers open themselves up to the fair questions from fans about why they made changes that did not work, when you’ve got all that evidence from the source about what does.

All of which brings me to Bryan Singer’s X-MEN, a good film that tells a decent X-Men story, but one that leaves me with conflicted feelings. I like X-MEN but it’s just not what I personally would have wanted out of the X-Men. There’s a purposeful reshuffling of the X-Men deck by Singer and the whole film is coated with a sense of Hollywood Knows Best. Some of it works, some of it doesn’t, but the forcefulness of Singer’s vision results in a consistent world that succeeds thanks to his three leads: Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellan, and Hugh Jackman.

I want to start with Jackman because nothing about X-MEN better displays my conflict. Jackman is very good as a mutant both caught between Xavier and Magneto’s competing MLK/Malcolm X worldviews, and he’s very good as the loner who takes Rogue under his wing so she doesn’t end up like him. Jackman is good. Jackman is very good. It’s just not the Wolverine I would have preferred to see.

For starters, Jackman’s Wolverine looks and acts about as tough as a bar of ivory soap. This is a Wolverine that’s been scrubbed clean and it looks like they spent more time getting his haircut right than his personality. When he fights, it’s like he’s never fought before. When he smokes, it’s like he’s never had a cigar before. And when he swings his claws around, he’s like an awkward kid on Halloween in a too-tight costume.

But.

But it’s a pretty darn great performance. It’s not the performance I want but it’s a darn good performance nonetheless. By the time he starts laying into the X-Men for their code names, I’m fully invested in this character. Jackman is an incredibly likable actor and he makes Wolverine likable. Instead of Logan being the best there is at what he does, Jackman’s Wolverine is just kind of dogged. Instead of being the ultimate loner, Jackman’s Wolverine gets awfully comfortable awfully fast in Xavier’s big, fancy mansion. And it works for this film.

X-MEN is an odd film, though. I’m not really sure what was going on with the casting, which seems like it was assembled haphazardly. The one casting that simply does not work for me is Famke Janssen as Jean Grey. Now, this is not wholly Janssen’s fault. I completely disagree with the older Jean, younger Scott (James Marsden) pairing and that’s on the producers, but Janssen’s personality is so flat here that I can’t imagine anyone wants to be with her, let alone have Scott and Logan fight over her.

There’s also a weird of mix of pure acting talent mixed with some lesser lights mixed with some stars and it just never really comes together for me. There’s no chemistry between Jean and anyone or Storm (Halle Berry) and anyone. As good as Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan are, Professor X and Magneto seem to do little more than deliver a never-ending string of speeches. I feel like most of the characters in the film – whether they work or not – have been conceived in a vacuum and in order to forward a political position and have a philosophical debate rather than to push this story forward.

Part of the problem with X-MEN for me is that there’s also a huge unease at the idea of superheroes. In part, it’s an historical issue – X-MEN (along with Blade, though that was not a traditional superhero story) served as the bridge between Batman and Robin and Spider-Man. With the final Schumacher Batman film, there was a real sense that the movie had gone too far and that superheroes were something to be exploited for their eccentricities. Raimi’s Spider-Man also turned up the heat on a specific trait for each character, but there was a real love for superheroes.

With Singer’s X-MEN, there’s no love for superheroes, at all. When Logan first meets Rogue (Anna Paquin), and they exchange names, he chides her for being called Rogue and she chides him for being called Wolverine, so they exchange their actual names: Marie and Logan. Later, despite the fact that he goes by Wolverine, Logan chides the rest of the team for having names like Storm and Cyclops. We do get a good line out of it, when he turns to Chuck and asks, “What do they call you, Wheels?,” but it just seems like an odd thing to point out. There’s also a shot at the costumes. When Logan complains about the black leather team outfits the X-Men wear, Cyclops asks, “What would you prefer? Yellow spandex?”

All of this sounds more negative than it actually plays, because X-MEN, as I said, has a consistent vision. As much as Singer has no use for most of these characters as superheroes or personalities, he is very interested in his core idea of a persecuted groups of humans and how they react to it. Professor X runs a school for the “gifted” and preaches good relations with humans. Hope is his core belief, contrasting with the cynical Magneto who welcomes a war with humans. The film does a really nice job complicating their positions; Xavier has higher hopes for humanity, but he hides the mutants away in his school, which he uses as a cover for the X-Men. He’s not much different than Mystique, in this manner, though his intent is better. Magneto welcomes conflict, but his actions are fueled by both his personal history as a survivor of the Holocaust, and by pride. It’s often misguided pride, but it is pride, nonetheless. Caught between them stands Wolverine, symbolically standing in for every mutant on the planet who’s not already aligned with Xavier’s school or Magneto’s Brotherhood.

Stewart and McKellan deliver powerful performances that rescue the film from their often silly monologues. For as much as X-MEN isn’t what I would have preferred to see, I never get tired of watching Stewart and McKellan’s respective performances. And it’s to the credit of two other actors that as good as these two experienced vets are, they’re not the best relationship in the film.

As useless as Jean Grey is in this film, her position as Scott’s girlfriend and Logan’s object of lust creates a wonderfully childish and antagonistic relationship between Logan and Scott. I feel like the film totally stacks the deck against Scott, but Marsden’s performance is my favorite in the film. He gives Cyclops this incredible sense of belonging; no other character in the film feels like he or she belongs more where they are than Scott Summers, and Marsden wonderfully adds some spice to Scott’s stoic nature by his childish barbs with Logan. When Scott thinks Wolverine might be actually be Mystique in disguise, he asks Logan to prove he is who he says he is.

“You’re a dick,” Logan deadpans.

“Okay,” Scott answers.

It’s a great moment, but there’s a whole lot of stupid dialogue in this film. When Logan confronts Storm’s allegiance to Xavier by telling her there’s a war coming and wondering if she’s on the right side, Storm’s comeback is to say, “At least I’ve chosen a side.” Huh? Would it be better if he chose Magneto’s side?

The best line of the film belongs to Magneto, though. When he’s got the X-Men trapped in the Statue of Liberty, Scott orders Storm to “fry him!”

“Oh, yes! A bolt of lightning into a huge copper conductor,” Magneto mocks. “I thought you lived at a school.”

Unfortunately, for as much as the film is invested in the Xavier/Magneto political relationship, the movie undercuts the politician at the heart of the conflict. There’s a ridiculous subplot involving Magneto turning Senator Kelly (Bruce Davison) into a mutated human. I’d rather have seen Kelly stay active at the center of the conflict.

After all that, I do need to reiterate that I like X-MEN more than I dislike it, but the films suffers a bit from a death by a thousand small cuts. I like the movie but I can’t fully embrace it. Jackman, Marsden, Stewart, and McKellan make it a film worth watching, but no one else adds anything memorable.